Understanding The Socius Through Creative Mapping - Arie Graafland

57 Pages·2010·10.19 MB·English

Delft School of Design
Phd & Masters Reader
Delft School of Design
Copyright © 2010
UNDERSTANDING AD Graafland
THE SOCIUS
THROUGH
CREATIVE
MAPPING
TECHNIQUES
DSD Future Cities project
Prof Arie Graafland
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Understanding the Socius Through Creative Mapping Techniques:
Arie Graafland
Published by
Delft School of Design (DSD)
DSD Delft University of Technology
Berlageweg 1
Delft School of Design 2628 CR, Delft
The Netherlands,
2010
ISBN: 9789052693859
Cover Design by Gerhard Bruyns
Layout by Gerhard Bruyns
Inlay image: Portion of “Paula Scher, The World, 1998, Acrylic on Canvas.”
Copyright © 2010 A D Graafland
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm or
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any other means without written permission from the publisher.
UNDERSTANDING Delft School of Design
Copyright © 2010
AD Graafland
THE SOCIUS
THROUGH
CREATIVE
MAPPING
TECHNIQUES
DSD Future Cities project
Professor Arie Graafland
Introduction to the Organization
Understanding the Socius through creative mapping techniques is part of a Delft School of Design (DSD) MSc
research and design project called Future Cities, dealing with contemporary mapping techniques and related
to conceptual issues on cities and urban development in Mexico City and Santiago de Chile. The project has
set the themes for design-oriented work in the DSD MSc course which will be included in a forthcoming DSD
publication. In the present document you will find a description, of among others, a “game-board” theory. In
cooperation with the Dutch firm MVRDV, the DSD has contributed to a book with Actar publishers on this
subject entitled SpaceFighter (2007), a game theory edited by Winy Maas.
In Understanding the Socius we will focus not only on the game-board, but on other strategies as well: the
drift, layering, and rhizome. These four different strategies are common practices in many urban plans
and development strategies. Our focus will be on the specific conditions in which these strategies might be
operative, how they have emerged, and where their limits are in our present situation.
We have extended our cooperation with the Dessau Institute of Architecture (DIA) with a focus on the
Middle East; Israel in particular. The DIA Studio on Jerusalem headed by Alfred Jacoby, Arie Graafland, and
Gerhard Bruyns is related to the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem (http://www.bezalel.ac.il/
en/). Jerusalem is also the site for the design project of the DIA Studio. A parallel Studio will be working in
Cyprus (Nicosia) on a similar border project. Projects are site specific; a spatial situation in Jerusalem is not
comparable to Paris, London or Amsterdam.
With this discussion on the four strategies, we want to address not just a ‘method’ but also the ‘how’ and
the ‘why’ of the strategy. Design strategies are born in a certain period of time and place with their own
historical context and cultural determinants; they address urban problems, but also society as a whole. They
are never ‘innocent’, nor are they completely ‘objective’. They are bound to different ideas about society and
have different concepts of complexity. They cannot be imported, nor exported all over the globe.
For instance, many design studios take students out for site visits. One of the current interests is in the
Situationists “dérive” from the 60s, a meandering through Paris that grew into a more strategic operation
to map the streets of the city. The “drift” is, however, a strategy that implies much more than just a site visit
many students do for the projects they are designing. It was conceived of as a political counter-movement
that addressed specific design principles of the Modern movement that in our present day situation cannot
be repeated.
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“Layering”, on the other hand, is related to a post-modern society of the early 90s, also addressing late-
Modern design principles in developed countries. In this case, the competition entries by Bernard Tschumi
and Rem Koolhaas/OMA for Parc de la Villette in Paris deal with the same grounds that the Situationists
addressed with their drift. But here completely different strategies in a different political condition are
present.
Game-board strategies are discussed in the work of Raoul Bunschoten’s CHORA-practices; already here
we notice another society in question: contemporary Bucharest in Romania. In this text I briefly expand
Bunschoten’s ideas to Mexico, India and Africa.
The fourth strategy is probably the most complex: rhizome is an open-ended, indeterminate strategy referring
to a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I relate it to perceptual issues like
the drift, mainly dealing with developed countries. Whether these Deleuzian strategies of ‘smooth space’
will work in economically underdeveloped countries or in countries with a ‘civilian occupation’ like Israel
is still to be seen. It is however remarkable that part of the Israeli Defence Forces was interested in architects
like Tschumi who are inspired by deconstructivist readings of architecture. The text closes with an extensive
discussion on Jerusalem ‘s border conditions and the new settlements in the Occupied Territories, and the
use (or misuse if you like) of Deleuze’s conception of space.
4 IMAGES 1 and 2 (opposite): “Raoul Bunschoten, Urban
Flotsam, 2001”
Content
Introduction p 06
Different Conceptions of Space p 10
Four Mapping Techniques p 12
Geo-politics: Paris 1950-1960 p 12
Geo-politics without class; Paris 1983-1985 p 20 Delft School of Design
Copyright © 2010
Geo-politics in Romania, Asia and Africa p 23 AD Graafland
Intermezzo p 30
Rhizome p 31
Places and god’s-eyes p 35
The West Bank settlements in Israel p 36
Jerusalem p 38
Manhattan p 44
Complexity, Two Concepts p 48
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Introduction
In the conclusion of his article ‘The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention’ James Corner
directs our attention to the failure of the bureaucratic regime of city and landscape planning with its traditional
focus on objects and functions, which has failed to embrace the full complexity and fluidity of urbanism
and, more generally, of culture.1 In authority and closure, current techniques have neglected to embrace the
contingency, improvisation, error, and the uncertainty that inevitably circulate in the urban condition. Given
the complex nature of late-capitalist culture, together with the increased array of competing interest groups
and forces, it is becoming increasingly difficult for urban designers and planners to play any significant role
in the development of cities and regions beyond scenographic or environmental amelioration.2
As Corner rightfully points out, there is no shortage of theories and ideas. The problem nestles in the
‘translation’ from these theories into meaningful practices and new operational techniques. The difficulty
today is less a crisis of what to do than of how to do anything at all. In this, the questions of mapping as
practice, and of the map as an instrument, become paramount. These questions render Corner’s contribution
not only interesting, but also especially timely and relevant, since it provides an opening for the problems we
are facing in contemporary urbanism and architecture alike. This opening has not gone unnoticed in recent
debates on the agency of mapping and of the map, as many advances in academic circles show.3 Despite of
this, the outcomes of these debates are far from satisfactory, especially in terms of the many diverting positions
that view these issues in completely incompatible ways. In many instances, maps and mappings are still seen
as subservient to questionable agendas of “imperialist technocracy and control”, of “mapping as a means
of projecting power-knowledge” through imposition and reproduction.4 This may be explained partially
because of mapping’s prevalent association to historical or historicist interpretations of geographical, spatial,
cultural, social or ethnical ‘otherness’. Conventionally, historical maps have been caught in the dialectics of
‘true and false’. For instance, throughout the age of exploration, European maps gave a one-sided view of
ethnic encounters.5 They supported Europe’s God-given right to territorial appropriation, while European
atlases promoted a Eurocentric, imperialist view. J.B. Harley explains, for instance, how in many seventeenth
and eighteenth century maps natives are depicted riding an ostrich or a crocodile, engaging in cannibal
practices, or displaying bodily malformations, as a French map of the eighteenth century shows in which
a race of men and women with tails is depicted. Female sexuality in the representation of African women,
and allegories for America and other continents is often explicit for the benefit of male-dominated European
societies.6
On the other hand, mapping is often associated with the failure of universalistic approaches towards master
planning and the imposition of state-controlled schemes and politico-ideological models. Not surprisingly,
these views only increase the difficulty of thinking in terms of mapping as a means to envision and create
anything outside of the status quo. There is a widespread perspective that highlights the pessimistic
undertone of mappings as reductive or simplistic, erroneous, authoritarian, or coercive; something that has
also opened a discourse that wishes to place the projective disciplines, architecture and urbanism included,
“beyond mapping”, as the efforts of the Berlage Institute show.7
IMAGE 3 and 4 opposite: “Two Sketches: Christopher
Columbus, The Northwest coast of Hispaniola, c. 1493; and
6 opposite Alessandro Zorsi, The New and Old Worlds, ”
But mapping is more than an instrument of authoritarian or imperialistic regimes, and a subordinate tool for
master-planners. From a general standpoint, mapping is a cultural activity that reunites important aspects
of perception and cognition. It functions as an instrument for the visualization to different needs, for the
understanding of spatial phenomena, for the storage of information, as a research tool by which we can
comprehend relationships and distribution patterns, and so forth. In short, there is a sort of ‘map intelligence’
through which the earth and many other phenomena may be represented with a certain degree of factuality Delft School of Design
Copyright © 2010
or accuracy. In this sense, mappings, like architecture, reunite both, scientific data and artistic expressions in
AD Graafland
a format that has extraordinary potentials.8 However, one of the problems that Corner identifies in his article
is related precisely to the fact that we view maps more in terms of what they represent, and less in what
they do; his critique is that maps are regarded as mere ‘mirrors of reality’ or depictions, as instruments of
measurement and empirical description.
The map can also be employed as a means; effectively a re-working or reformulation of what already exists.
And although this is an important step we need to keep in mind that what already exists is not given in
perception alone. It includes natural forces, historical events, political interests, and programmatic structures.
In other words, one of the most important characteristics of this ‘reformulation’ is that it includes conceptual
issues, setting the factors from which eidetic and physical worlds may emerge. Landscape or space is not
something given or external to our apprehension; it is constituted or formed through our participation
with things, material objects, images, values, cultural codes, cognition and events. Space is subjectively
constituted, which makes the map more of a project than of an empirical description. In Corner’s sense
maps have very little to do with representation as depiction. More specifically, Corner refers to the activity
of mapping –mapping in its active sense-, as “creative practice” and as “a collective enabling project” with
productive, liberating capacities. In this understanding maps are not retrospective or representational tools
exclusively; their power lies in their capacity of simultaneously concealing and revealing potential, allowing
us to discern what is from what is not, and to envision what is not yet. The act of mapping is then an agency
-a practice- that helps us to engender and remodel the world. In this understanding, mapping is then less
related to a “mirror of reality” than to the re-shaping the world in which we live. Maps are performative,
pragmatic instruments that “emancipate potentials, enrich experiences and diversify worlds”.9 They seem
to be involved in a double operation, finding and exposing on the one hand, and relating, connecting and
structuring on the other. Contemporary mappings do not represent geographies or ideas, but rather they
effect their actualization.
Mapping as a creative process, is not only particularly instrumental in the construing and constructing of
lived space, but also encompasses durational experiences and generates effects. Mapping unfolds potential, it
re-makes territory; it uncovers realities previously not seen or unimagined.10 And this is particularly relevant
in our present. Our contemporary world changes at such speed and complexity that nothing remains certain
or stable.
On the other hand, a large portion of today’s societies live in a world where local economies and cultures are
tightly bound into global ones. Surrounded by media images and an excess of communication that makes the
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far seem near and the shocking merely normal, local cultures have become fully networked, Corner writes.
Interrelationships and effects are becoming of greater significance for intervening in urban landscapes than
compositional arrangements. Part of globalisation is our network of microelectronics and communications
technology, which might change local interests in a very short time span, even transforming our notions about
nature and society. “Communication”, as a commonly used term, has changed its meaning. “Digitalisation”
as part of globalisation has modified our outlook of the world. Most of this communication travels at high
speeds, yet the “means” are not to be separated from the “contents”, especially not in design practices like
architecture and urbanism.
Cyberspace in particular, forces human beings to re-conceptualise their spatial situation inasmuch as they
experience their positions in cyberspace only as simulations in some “virtual life” form, as Timothy Luke
argues.11 Luke’s argument is that we might need another reasoning to capture these digital worlds. The
epistemological foundations of conventional reasoning in terms of political realism, as we find them in
notions about city and countryside, are grounded in the modernist laws of “second nature”. In taking up the
notions of “first” and “second” nature, Luke defines the “third nature” as the informational cybersphere/
telesphere. Digitalisation shifts human agency and structure from a question of manufactured matter to
a mere register of informational bits. Human presence gets located in the interplay of the two modes of
nature’s influence. According to Luke “first nature” gains its identity from the varied terrains forming the
bioscape/ecoscape/geoscape of terrestriality. Our traditional notions of “space” are under pressure, and it
might be wise to first see how these notions have changed before we go on to different mapping techniques
using different notions of time/space. As Corner reminds us, ideas about spatiality are moving away from
physical objects towards a variety of territorial, political and psychological social processes that flow through
space.12
8 IMAGE 5: “Juan de la Cosa, Map of the New World, 1500.”
Delft School of Design
Copyright © 2010
AD Graafland
IMAGE 6: Portion of “Paula Scher, The World, 1998, Acrylic 9
on Canvas.”
Different Conceptions of Space
As anyone dealing with the spatial disciplines will know, one of the most difficult enterprises of carrying out
research and study in these fields is to find an appropriate interpretation of the notion of space. The different
and not unproblematic understandings of this word –one of the most complicated in our language13 - are
context-specific and generally require a particular discursive framework to become operative. Our project
on Mapping Urban Complexity is not different: it is essential to define our notions of space from the outset
if what we want is to approach “the urban”, and explore different techniques and methods through which
we might begin to map its complexities. Here, the work of geographer David Harvey is a relevant and
interesting entry point to frame and discuss the notions of space. For decades now, he has dedicated a large
part of his scholarly work to find the links and associations between different notions of space and urban
phenomena. Starting in 1973 with the publication of his book Social Justice and the City14 , Harvey’s inquiries
have usually focused on the nature of space as a heuristic device to investigate, access and interpret diverse
urban processes [under capitalism]. In particular, his formulation on space in his essay ‘Space as a Keyword’,
originally presented as part of the Hettner-Lectures in Heidelberg in 2004, and edited for his more recent
book Spaces of Global Capitalism, is relevant in this context precisely because in it he argues for three different
conceptions of space: absolute space, relative space and relational space.15 The connection that Harvey draws to
Henri Lefebvre’s previous tripartite distinction of space is explicit: the perceived space of materialized spatial
practice, the conceived space as representations of space, and the lived spaces of representation. Our spaces of
representation are part and parcel of the way we live in the world. We represent them by images, photos,
artistic constructions, urban game-boards, mapping techniques and architecture.
One of the claims that Harvey puts forward in his investigation of these three ‘types’ of spatialities is that
Lefebvre was probably influenced by Cassirer, who early on set up a tripartite division of modes of human
spatial experience, distinguishing between organic space, perceptual space and symbolic space. In summary,
organic spaces are all those forms of spatial experience given biologically and registered through the
particular characteristics of our senses. Perceptual space refers to the ways in which we process the physical
and biological experience neurologically and register it in the world of thought. Symbolic space on the other
hand is abstract; it generates distinctive meanings through interpretation. Henri Lefebvre’s own tripartite
division of material space, (the space of experience and of perception), the representation of space (space as
conceived and represented), and spaces of representation (the lived space of sensations, imagination, emotions,
incorporated into our daily life) may be comparable to Cassirer’s formulation of organic, perceptual and
symbolic spaces. Harvey suggests a “speculative leap” in which he places the threefold division of absolute,
relative and relational space-time up against the tripartite division of experienced, conceptualized and lived space
identified by Lefebvre. Although the matrix that is constructed or conceptualised in this way might have
restrictions, it is at the same time interesting to see what it might give us for our mapping project.
Harvey’s first distinction involves the notion of absolute space, where space is represented and treated as fixed
and predetermined. Absolute space serves as a framework –a pre-existing and immovable grid, as Harvey
describes it- in which we plan or record events. This grid is obviously subject to standard measurements
and calculation; hence it is also the geometrical space of cadastral mapping and engineering practices.16 This
notion of space is heavily indebted to Euclid’s geometries, Descartes’ res extensa –the space of individuation:
a space that looks at the world with a sense of “mastery” devised to abolish uncertainty and doubt-; and later
to Isaac Newton’s formulations of matter. Absolute space is then the space of increasing measurement and
accuracy, all the way up to measurement from space satellites. In many cases it is the notion present in more
traditional ideas about planning and urban design.
The second and relative notion of space is associated with Einstein’s work and non-Euclidean geometries that
were developed in the 19th century. Referring to Gauss and in particular to Euler’s assertion that a perfectly
scaled map of any portion of the earth’s surface is impossible, Harvey shows that it is equally impossible
to understand space independent of time. We can create completely different maps of relative locations by
differentiating between distances measured in terms of cost, time, modal split, networks and topological
relations.17 Furthermore, the standpoint of the observer plays a critical role, an idea that is also very present
in James Corner’s essay, as we will see throughout this text.
The third concept, the relational concept of space, finds its origins in Leibniz, an important opponent of the notions
of absolute space. This concept of space is internal to, or embedded in process.18 Here, it becomes impossible
to distinguish space from time. It implies the idea of internal relations: external influences are internalized in
processes through time. Measurement becomes increasingly problematic once we come closer to the world
of relational space-time.19 As Harvey claims, “relational conceptions of space-time bring us to the point where
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mathematics, poetry, and music converge if not merge.”20 There are many difficult questions that accompany